Romney’s income taxes: Is Reid’s attack based on a lie?

This is “gutter politics” of the lowest sort, said Richard Cohen in The Washington Post. Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader, last week accused presidential candidate Mitt Romney of paying no federal income taxes at all for 10 years. What proof did Reid offer for this implausible allegation? He claimed to have been tipped off by an “extremely credible” former investor at Bain Capital, the firm Romney once headed. When Romney challenged Reid to “put up or shut up” and name his source, said Rich Lowry in NationalReview.com, “Scurrilous Harry” had the gall to repeat his accusation on the Senate floor—while insisting it was Romney’s obligation to prove him wrong by releasing his tax returns prior to 2010. Coming from the “highest-ranking elected Democrat in Congress,” such McCarthyism is a disgrace.

Reid is clearly carrying President Obama’s water here, said Steve Kornacki in Salon.com,but there’s a reason his allegation—crazy or not—has Republicans in such a lather. By bringing attention back to Romney’s taxes, he’s forcing the GOP nominee “to address a topic he’s badly trying to avoid.” Romney, who’s refused to release any returns other than those from 2010 and 2011, now faces the difficult choice of either giving in to Reid’s demand for more returns, or making it look like he’s hiding something. Meanwhile, Reid could care less what Republicans are saying about him, because at 72 he’s just one year into his last six-year Senate term, and is thus “immune to shaming.” He must be, said Mark Steyn in NationalReview.com, given that Reid has never released his own tax returns. What an outrageous hypocrite. Reid’s returns would be quite interesting to see, too, given that “we have no idea by what fortuitous process a lifelong ‘public servant’ becomes a multimillionaire,” as the Nevada Democrat has somehow managed to do.

But Reid isn’t running for president—Romney is, said Adam Sorensen in Time. And if Romney wants to win this election, he needs to release more tax returns prior to 2010. Whatever those returns contain, they can’t be “that explosive.” People already know he’s worth $250 million, and paid just 13.9 percent in federal taxes in 2010. To win the election, Romney has to shift the spotlight to the president’s handling of the economy, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. That’s why “Romney should have released his tax returns long ago.” Until he does, he’s making his quest to oust an ineffective president “harder than it should be.”

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So why the continued secrecy? asked Alec MacGillis in TNR.com.And why did a detail-oriented, calculating guy who’s been running for president since at least 2006 fail to “rid his personal finances of anything that could cause problems in a campaign?” One theory: He just couldn’t bear to cost himself any money. “Famously a penny-pincher,” Romney is described by those who know him as having a true “bottom line mentality,” devoted to amassing as much money as possible. This may explain why he claimed to be a full-time Utah resident to save on taxes while still listing himself as the Massachusetts-based Bain’s CEO; why he hid money in Swiss bank accounts, the Cayman Islands, and other questionable tax shelters; and why he apparently used even riskier tax tricks in the pre-2010 returns that he’d rather not share with voters. What those returns might reveal, I suspect, is that “as much as Romney clearly wants to be president, it may not have been his ultimate priority, after all.”